Mendieta's talk is part of the year-long series, Freedom, Personhood and Justice, sponsored by the College's Lectures and Forums Committee and the women’s and gender studies program. The event is free and open to the public.

Mendieta was born in Colombia and raised in the United States. He was a founding member of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Hispanics in Philosophy. Over the last decade he has edited about a dozen books dealing with contemporary Latin American philosophy and issues relating to religion, globalization, and global justice. He has published a collection of political interviews with Richard Rorty titled Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself (Stanford University Press, 2006), and a book of interviews with prison activist Angela Y. Davis, dealing with Abu Ghraib, mass incarceration in the United States, and torture as a weapon of the state. The latter book is entitled Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Torture and War (Seven Stories Press, 2006).

Freedom, Personhood and Justice is meant to stimulate ideas about justice and democracy through an exploration of the lived and legal experience of norms. The series will foreground the nature of the problems of racism, sexism, and other systems of exclusion. The structure of our inquiry is pragmatic, investigating societal practices that strive for the ideals of equality, fairness, unbiased thinking, freedom, and liberty, among other related concepts.